Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 623 posts

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#501

Post by est31 »

cosmodisk wrote: post #365
giancarlostoro wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. We've not gone back to having well funded research facilities like this one since Bell Labs. Those were amazing days where we saw a lot of amazing breakthroughs. I wish companies like Microsoft and the rest would invest in external research institutes more.

I often think that if I were a billionaire,I'd rather spend hundreds of millions on some cool R&D projects rather than having some 100 meter boat that one uses a only a few times a year. I could at least walk around in 20 or so years and say "I funded this" rather than pointing at a rusting boat nobody will ever care about.

Paul Allen had both:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute

https://www.cs.washington.edu/building

In fact this tradition of rich people founding universities and research is nothing new. Stanford University was founded by a couple who said "The children of California shall be our children" after their child died. Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Technical Schools, and John Harvard donated money and his library to a college founded two years earlier.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#502

Post by anaphor »

Scarblac wrote: post #169
gdb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…

Even if AGI is achievable, we already have plenty human intelligence. It remains to be seen if AGI will lead to anything over what we can already do.

That's (one) of my issues with this whole thing. Why would we want to emulate human intelligence exactly? Human intelligence is incredibly flawed. Giving it more memory and quicker processing power won't necessarily lead to any special insights or new ideas. We can use domain-specific AI technology to do amazing things obviously, but I haven't seen any good explanation of how combining these things will lead to anything more human-like. Useful for building new tech? Definitely. Humanlike? Maybe, but there seem to be a lot of missing pieces. And even if you could find those missing pieces, I don't think it adds anything except to our scientific understanding of the human mind (which is great, but isn't going to immediately revolutionize society).

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#503

Post by carapace »

013a wrote: post #279
gdb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…

"Guardrails" is such a cute little term. AGI is a twenty-ton semi filled with rocket fuel. Guardrails won't stop it from careening into an elementary school if it decides that's its most optimal course of action. Mostly because, despite the previous analogy; no one knows what AGI is. No one knows what it will look like. No one will know when we've created it. No one even knows what INTELLIGENCE is in humans. How can…

What about Daleks made with human brain organoids†?

There's a cheap, proven AGI technology right there. Plug in sensors and actuators and set up a reward system and the little balls of brain will figure out what to do, eh?

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_organoid

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#504

Post by breck »

p1esk wrote: post #479
breck wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could explain it to you in an afternoon. But I’m not going to do it online, because then you have a thousand people call you “delusional”, because you simply are stating that exponential processes are going to continue. For some reason, many people who think themselves rational and scientific believe that things that have been going exponentially are suddenly going to go linear. To me, that is delusional.

Explain what?

How to get to AGI.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#505

Post by H8crilA »

Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#506

Post by BigChiefSmokem »

H8crilA wrote: post #505

Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.

Because Microsoft has calculated a reasonable ROI to make it worth it.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#507

Post by one2know »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #506
H8crilA wrote: post #505

Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.

Because Microsoft has calculated a reasonable ROI to make it worth it.

Or management wants to exfiltrate $1B of shareholder dollars.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#508

Post by H8crilA »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #506
H8crilA wrote: post #505

Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.

Because Microsoft has calculated a reasonable ROI to make it worth it.

Yeah but how's the return exactly going to come about (dividends? merger and talent takeover?), that's the question. I can see it returning itself via better ML sales on Azure.

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#509

Post by blockchainman »

blockchainman wrote: post #94
gdb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at OpenAI.) It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable. We've talked about why we think it might be: https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-ag... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :). EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other pro…

Don’t you think AI has foundational flaws according to goedels incompleteness theorems? Also not trying to rain on your parade! Congratulations! Just trying to have a constructive conversation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_the...

I was simply alluding to this :

"Roger Penrose and J.R. Lucas argue that human consciousness transcends Turing machines because human minds, through introspection, can recognize their own inconsistencies, which under Gödel’s theorem is impossible for Turing machines. They argue that this makes it impossible for Turing machines to reproduce traits of human minds, such as mathematical insight."

Re: Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI

#510

Post by api »

sgt101 wrote: post #336
logicchains wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any sense in which Godel's incompleteness theorem implied that Artificial General Intelligence was impossible would also imply that General Intelligence is impossible; the human brain isn't immune to the laws of logic. The human brain is just a very complex, possibly quantum, computer. Short of believing in some kind of supernatural human soul, there's no reason to expect a sufficiently complex computer couldn't matc…

I think that there are other mechanisms apart from computation; the question is - are they operant in our universe? The implication of the answer being "no" is that we are automaton, free will does not exist (it isn't even an illusion, you are as much a puppet thinking about it as you are trying to change your fate. Well, moving on from there we can dismantle all of the morality and humanity of our lives and not chan…

We have yet to duplicate anything even near human intelligence or introspective abilities with computation. We therefore have no existence proof that human mind is purely computational in nature. I think we can safely say that computation is necessary to produce a mind, but we cannot yet say for certain that it is sufficient.

Mind may require something else that we don't yet understand. (Not necessarily claiming it would have to be supernatural, just not yet understood. Perhaps quantum computation or some other kind of quantum effect?)

Post reply on HN